Movie Nation

The documentary as memoir may be the trickiest to pull off.

In an era when obsession with “personal story” and “personal struggle,” it’s difficult to make one that stands out from what sounds like a chorus of Pavorittis warming up — “Me me me me MEEEEEEEE.”

And if you can’t relate to the person making it on virtually any level, well, it’s tune-out time.

I’ve liked some of Judith Hefland‘s work when I’ve run across films of hers on the PBS “POV” documentary series, “Blue Vinyl” (about the toxic plastic all around us) stands out. I can’t recall if she was there the day I hung out with veteran director George Stoney as he traveled my corner of North Carolina to talk up and do some interviewing for the labor history of the South film “The Great Uprising of 1934.” She co-directed that.

But “Love & Stuff,” her second doc feature about close relationship with her mother, left me cold.

She revisits — at length — the trauma covered in “A Healthy Baby Girl” (Hefland had cervical cancer at 25 caused by a miscarriage-prevention drug her mother was given). “The camera helped us stay connected,” she says of her incessantly videotaped moments with mom, decades-worth, but it’s obvious they were ridiculously tight, with or without “documenting” visits to the beach, meals, etc.

“Love & Stuff” covers that relationship’s end, her mother’s death and dispersal of her “stuff,” much of which Hefland ended up stuffing into her otherwise roomy Upper West Side apartment. Scores of elephant figurines, tchotchkes of every description, used lipsticks and dental appliances — she wanted to save it all to keep that connection with Mom.

It’s punctuated by Helfand’s adopting a baby girl at 50, and her efforts to lose weight so that she will make it to 90, when baby Theodora will be 40.

“How do you live without your mother?” she wonders, weeping, after her own mother dies.

The film is all over the place, like life — messy. But boy, this memoir got on my last nerve.

Maybe it’s the timing, seeing this in the middle of a pandemic, with much of the country out of work, millions upon millions without health care. Try to “connect” with a woman who only pulls the trigger on an adoption when a Jewish baby girl is available, who hires a nurse to get her through the first few days of motherhood, the nanny she brings in to do childcare afterwards, the shrink she consults when trying to take off the weight she put on in the decades after her hysterectomy, the personal trainer, the elective surgery to shrink her stomach.

The privilege and indulgence would have stood out at any time. Mid-pandemic? Eye-rolling is the only polite response.

Perhaps others will find points of connection that make this worthwhile to them. Not me. Some people you have to let “speak my truth, recount my struggle” to somebody else.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Judith Helfand

Credits: Written and directed by Judith Hefland. A Medalia release.

Running time: 1:19

Even indie films can be “high concept,” a movie whose premise can be summed up in a single, short sentence.

“Phoenix, Oregon” is “Big Night” in a bowling alley.

That 1996 dramedy, with Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub playing two brothers rolling the dice, trying to make a splash with their “traditional” Italian restaurant in small-town New Jersey, is a landmark in independent cinema, a template for what a good indie film can be. Under-utilized actors invest their hearts and souls in a film that touches viewers, finds its audience and changes their career trajectories.

“Phoenix, Oregon” has a bit of that about it, a quintet of all-in performances by James Le Gros, Lisa Edelstein, Diedrich Bader, Kevin Corrigan and especially Jesse Borrego that render an intimate but predictable story so engaging we don’t mind getting ahead of it.

Writer-director Gary Lundgren (“Redwood Highway”) has conjured up another penny plain story with a vivid sense of geography and just-colorful-enough characters, a film about abandoned dreams awakened in a new form, old wounds finally forgotten in spite of the scars they’ve left.

Veteran character actor James Le Gros (currently on “Hunters”) has been around since “Night Rider,” and lands a rare lead here. He’s “Big Time Bobby” Hoffman, a guy well over 40, living in an Airstream trailer his mother left him, still tending bar.

A one-time art school kid, he dreamed of comic book glory, drawing and writing stories he can’t find the gumption to pitch to publishers. His life’s highlight might have been the night he bowled 300 at the local lanes. Or maybe it was his marriage, which ended and which he cannot keep from obsessing over, rehashing it in his head and on the drawn page.

He puts up with the “douche” of a boss (Diedrich Bader, amusingly despicable) who steals his staff’s pooled-tips at the town’s one quasi-pretentious eatery (This was filmed in Klamath Falls, as Phoenix, Oregon is but a wide spot on I-5).

But the chef there (Jesse Borrego) thinks “there’s passion still swirling beneath all those failures, all those regrets” Bobby wears in his scowl. He’s got an idea to reopen the town’s bowling alley, calling it “Rising Phoenix,” and sell high-end pizzas of his creation along with the finest craft beers, wines and boozes that liquor dealer Tanya (Lisa Edelstein of “House”) can provide.

Chef Carlos is the sort of guy who tells people to “close your eyes and imagine…” A lot. But he’s a seductive pitchman and Borrego (“Fame,” “Dexter,” “Fear the Walking Dead”) is just mesmerizing in the role.

They’ve got some of the cash needed for start-up. But Tanya’s working with this hot-shot venture capitalist (Reynaldo Gallegos), one of those high-fiving “types” who uses the phrase “At’s what I’m talking about” and is all about a local legalized weed outfit he wants to take public.

Sure, he’s in, the “angel” investor that puts the dream within reach.

Grizzled screen smartass Kevin Corrigan (“Pineapple Express”) is the only guy in town who can fix the ’60s vintage lanes and repair the pin machines. He reams them on the cost, and rides Bobby like a hobby horse over his long-ago bowling glory.

“You haven’t seen the ACTION on my ball! You’re going WAY downtown, where the HEDGEhogs frown!”

The story’s predictable path gives us romantic entanglement, idealism facing pragmatism, a “Big Game” (opening night bowling tourney)  and nothing at all that we don’t see coming five ways from Sunday.

Some of the wrinkles in Bobby’s character feel contrived to fit the needs of the script. Edelstein’s Tanya likewise has a hint of “that doesn’t feel organic and authentic to the character” about her.

Le Gros has some bowling form, as does “Dreey Carrey Show” vet Bader. Corrigan? Well, it was nice of them to introduce him to the sport.

I’ll bet the “how this movie got made” story is interesting, too. Le Gross was in Lundgren’s “Redwood Highway,” and in the last episode of Edelstein’s series “House.”

What they collaborated on has an easygoing charm that puts it over, even if we remember the films that inspired it a little too well for its own good.

MPAA Rating: R for language.

Cast: James LeGros, Jesse Borrego, Lisa Edelstein, Diedrich Bader and Kevin Corrigan

Credits: Written and directed by Gary Lundgren.  An Aspiration Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:48

July 1, a pic about a crowded freeway and Russell C. as that a-hole in a pick-em-up truck you don’t want to be tangling with. Will theaters open in time for this?

The eye-roll, that universal symbol for “You gotta be kidding me,” gets a fearsome workout in “Si, Mi Amor,” a candy-colored rom-com bauble from Peru.

It’s as if the cast recognizes that many of the comic tropes and gender stereotypes they’re acting out are dated and retrograde — and not just to norteamericanos.

It’s about a guy who keeps a secret from his paranoid and insecure girlfriend, only to have her leap to the worst possible conclusion and melt down, telling off him and all their friends and her relatives at a Christmas party.

There’s a teen present, so Bea (Yiddá Eslava) becomes a Youtube sensation as “The Christmas Hulk” (“La Navidad Hulk,” as this is in Spanish with English subtitles).

The rest of the comedy is each trying to move on without the other, Bea living with her best friend and running into (literally, via fender-bender) her next beau, the doctor Horacio (Sebastian Monteghirfo), who wheezes and brays as he laughs, and Guillermo, aka “Guille” ( (Julián Zucchi) getting drunk, singing with the famous singing duo (don’t recognize them) and getting picked up with the girlishly manipulative Britany (Ximena Palamino).

This is what happens when a Peruvian takes up with an Argentinian, or so this slow-footed Pedro Flores Maldonado “romp” would have us believe. Because that’s one thing that pays comic dividends in the third act.

That’s when Bea has to deal with Argentinians, or rather Peruvian ideas of what Argentinians are like. Obsessed with Maradona, the soccer legend? Si. Arrogant, patronizing and pretentious, with a tendency to correct that Spanish of their Latin American lessers? Oh, si, si.

Guille’s accent is a big joke to strangers he meets in his little organic food/medicine shop. The word muttered in his direction is “maricón,” which may play for laughs south of the border, but is very out-of-date in most of the rest of the world.

“Si, mi Amor” has the obligatory gay BFF (Andrés Salas), a mincing, lisping bitchy-sissy editor-boss at Bea’s newspaper (she writes horoscopes) and a lead couple that set off no sparks. We’re pretty much invited to assume Guille is gay, right from the opening “We should be more than friends” scene.

“Your voice is high! You’re LYING Guille!”

Maldonado gives us a quick picture of modern day Lima, the street music and club scene. Actors get to trot out their versions of playing a drunk, throwing a tantrum, dancing, singing karaoke (or singing along with a band).

Cute gags? A breaking into a cell-phone bit is cute, the drunk scenes aren’t bad. The only really funny moments come very late, those lessons in “How to be more Argentinian.”

Maldonado leaves promising premises at the door and confines himself to easier laughs, for the most part.

The women are mostly shrill, judgmental harridans or gold-diggers, stress binge-eaters and club hotties, and wishing this “couple” back together seems like a stretch.

But the good-humored, better looking neighbor (Mayra Couto) who keeps running into Guille at the worst moments — moving his ex’s underwear out, locked out, nearly nude in the middle of a bleach-job — is out of the question, I guess.

The performers are all polished and make do the best they can with a script that has maybe 50 minutes worth of rom-com lost in a 100 minute movie.

However this played in Peru and the rest of South America, I could have used a LOT more “Let’s make fun of Argentinians.” If you’re leaning on stereotypes, the gay ones are played out, but the Pretentious People of the Pampas are still fair game.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Yiddá Eslava, Julián Zucchi, Andrés Salas, Mayra Couto, Ximena Palamino, Sebastian Monteghirfo.

Credits: Written and directed by Pedro Flores Maldonado. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

There must be a template in a screenwriting textbook, or a “Thriller Writing for Dummies” edition that has to “protagonist finds a BUTTLOAD of cash” scenario that every lazy hack under the midnight sun can use as guideline.

Because heaven knows, we see that story line a lot. I guess if aspiring screenwriters can say “Hey, the legendary Cormac McCarthy got away with it (“No Country for Old Men”), Why not me?”

So whatever kudos are due screen veteran Tom Berenger, who turns 71 at the end of May, for stumbling around in the snows of Maine, hunting and getting hunted, the thriller “Blood and Money” hangs on utter hackwork as a screenplay.

Maybe it started with “Platoon,” but more likely with 1993’s “Sniper.” Casting people, especially for B-movies, have no trouble seeing Berenger behind a rifle scope. So even if the eyes squint with age and the movements have a gingerly hint of care about them, here he is, another retired “Marine,” Jim Reed, a loner out to “get my buck” in the not-quite-tractless wilderness up near the Canadian border.

We pick up from Jim’s “custom job” camper that he’s living lean, with photos that hint that he had a family at one time. As a hunter, he’s not the most particular shooter. He kills a doe, but can navigate around that by calling an old acquaintance who knows somebody with “a doe stamp” and “could use the meat.”

We see him in AA, hear the hard luck stories of the men therein, one of whom admits he takes out things on his wife and family.

And when he overhears the waitress (Kristen Hager) hashing out her problems on the phone out back, he has sympathy. “My daughter was just LIKE you.” Emphasis on “WAS.”

Jim jaws a little with the various state game wardens, with clerks in stores, many of whom are talking about the “casino robbery” and shootout that happened nearby (this was filmed around Oxford, Maine). Jim barely engages with this.

But back out in the remote snow and trees, missing his shot at a buck has him careless enough to take a second shot at the first sign of movement. Damned if he doesn’t kill one of the robbers, a woman he watches bleed out, bellowing complaints “What are you DOING here?” at her as she does.

What’s Jim do? He high-tails it. It’s only when he thinks back later about clues he might have left at the crime scene that he goes back. And that’s when he takes the big black duffel stuffed with money.

The remainder of “Blood and Money,” which was first titled “Allagash” (the region where this is set), is even more perfunctory — facing off with the rest of the gang, picking them off, getting an innocent bystander killed, seeking some sort of dubious “redemption” in the process.

As trite as the screenplay’s bones are, they’re nothing to the dubious moralism or “code” or what have you writer-director John Barr tries to shove in here. Jim’s present is not unlike his past. He’s done a terrible wrong, and he’s not accepting responsibility for it. His actions and reactions are quite human — careless, coverup, then kill or be killed and don’t sweat the collateral damage.

The story’s over-familiarity isn’t the best reason to skip “Blood and Money.” Its messaging is. And whatever butch points Berenger earns for getting the job done in extreme conditions at an age when “don’t slip you’ll break your hip” has to be a concern are squandered on a film that isn’t worth it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Tom Berenger, Kristen Hager, Paul-Ben Victor, Jimmy LeBlanc

Credits: Directed by John Barr, screenplay by John Barr, Alan Petherick. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:30

If “accuracy” should never supersede the demands of “story” in a screen biography, then Josh Trank’s “comeback,” an account of the last months of mobster Al Capone’s life, can be dismissed as a total write-off.

Starring Tom Hardy in a “Method” immersion into “Capone” that borders on utter incoherence, playing the syphilitic psychotic after he’s lost much of his mind and most control of his bowels, it’s far more interesting than that.

The Dark Knight’s “Bane” sounds like Alan Rickman reciting Shakespeare by comparison, the demented growl further muffled by an omnipresent cigar. This Capone is a study in diseased, malign decrepitude, balding, lurching, scarred — with eyes that give away the memory of murderous menace, guilt and maybe even regret.

The most obvious read in those eyes, straight off, is confusion. The performance may be challenging, almost inaccessible. But you can’t say it’s “wrong.”

Trank (“Chronicle” was his big break, “Fantastic Four” his undoing) captures Capone in his gauche Miami mansion, celebrating the last Thanksgivings of his life. He may be running out of money and is certainly far removed from mob power. He served ten years in prison for tax fraud, undone by the IRS. Now, the Feds are watching and listening for anything else he might give away as lives out his last days in tacky splendor.

He romps with the grandkids, “Godfather” style, in the film’s opening. By the end, he’s in a diaper, his paranoia matched by his incontinence.

Strokes are stalking him, but his embittered wife Mae (Linda Cardellini) accepts that at least now, she has “peace and quiet.” The threat of drive-bys, gang wars arrest are far in the past. He growls “I love you,” and she acts as if she’s never heard the phrase in her life.

“He don’t scare me” is all she’ll say to “the men” they keep close by, to the doctor (Kyle MacLachlan) the Feds have coerced into treating him.

The family is near, but these collect calls from Cleveland point to an estranged son that nobody but “Fonse” knows about. That matters to no one. What does he have to pass on to anybody, even his son by Mae (Mason Guccione)?  Nothing.

Except, in his sentient moments — when he’s not dreaming of his salad days, banquets where he was feted and Louis Armstrong was the entertainment — he remembers something.

“I hid $10 million bucks!”

“Where?”

“I don’t f—–g know!”

There’s a potential “treasure hunt” the movie might have explored, to farcical effect. But Trank takes all this ugliness too seriously for that.

Capone is haunted by his murderous past, still seeing the blood spilled in his name by his still-loyal lieutenant (Gino Cafarelli). He can still make “cut your f—–g head off” threats to anybody who makes moves to sell his ugly statuary. But he’s in no position to follow through.

Unless it’s a gator who steals a fish and his rod from his boat while he’s out with old pal Johnny (Matt Dillon). Old Alphonse fetches a shotgun and blasts the offending reptile.

“Was it WORTH it?”

Johnny is almost amused.

“This is what happens when people spend too much time in Florida. They turn into f—–g HILLbillies!”

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Hardy is unshakably in character, first scene to last, chomping on that cigar and later a carrot when the doctor orders a substitution, fending off fresh Federal interrogations, fantasizing a Biblical Tommy Gun vengeance upon “these people” he no longer recognizes around him.

It’s not “Scarface” colorful, and the scattered flashbacks — seeing his boyhood self — don”t reveal much of anything. It’s as if Trank wanted to ensure this wasn’t  some anti-heroic celebration of a monster, and stripped the glory, sympathy and psychoanalysis out of the story down to the point where no one would make that mistake.

But Hardy is fascinating to watch, first scene to last, an actor wholly committed, as always, even if the script for this showcase feels incomplete or straight-to-video.

Hardy MPAA Rating: R for strong/bloody violence, pervasive language and some sexuality

Cast: Tom Hardy, Linda Cardellini, Matt Dillon, Kyle MacLachlan

Written and directed by Josh Trank. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:44

How bad is the Colombian farce “No Andaba Muerto, Estaba de Parrando,” clumsily translated to “Death Can Wait” on your English language Netflix menu?

After flailing away for what seems like forever, setting up “You have six weeks to live” premise, its travel-agents-stumble-into-the-company’s money laundering scheme and thus skip off for the European vacation of their dreams, mugging for the camera and nattering and chattering unfunny jokes, running “gag,” our two leading  men are subjected to the film’s first genuinely amusing moment.

In a simple streetside cafe one-on-one conversation between the “dying” Juan Pablo (Ricardo Quevedo) and his annoying, exhausting nuisance of a “like a brother” colleague, Javier (Nelson Polonia), writer-director Fernando Ayllón “breaks the plane.”

He stops his comedy cold by tripping over one of the fundamental rules of seamless filmmaking. It’s rare. A few have done it on purpose over the decades, but it’s almost always a clumsy mistake.  I can’t remember the last movie I saw, outside of a student films showcase at a lower tier film school, where it made it into the movie.

“No Andaba Muerto, Estaba de Parranda” actually translates as “I’m not dead, I was just out partying,” and the phrase is a Spanish language meme that’s been around for years. Google it and you see jokey photos of dead dictators (Franco, Castro) and others.

Hilarious.

The film is about the put-upon Juan Pablo, misused by his gold-digging, cheating girlfriend, pranked by her punk son, arm-twisted and hustled by the security guard at his workplace and forced to do all the work that the dolt, cellphone game app-addicted, gum-snapping boss is supposed to do.

Then there’s the overbearing and infantile colleague Javier, a motormouthed boor always leering at the new assistant (Liss Pereira) and taunting his “brother” about how his life isn’t working out, when it’s obvious neither of these two have anything to get up for in the morning.

Their running word-game gag, where they launch into rhymes like “baker, maker, taker, and “faker” on hearing any random word that can be rhymed in conversation, isn’t funny. Their punning riffs on “naked truth” and the like aren’t funny, even allowing for “lost in translation” issues.

And then a fall at work sends Juan Pablo to the hospital (by crowded city bus, because ambulances would cost the company too much). And the MRI reveals, his distracted, heartless, sexing-up-her-nurse doctor gives him the news before answering her phone.

“Glioblastoma…six weeks to live,” she says (in Colombian Spanish with English subtitles). “Put your affairs in order…Enjoy your last days. Excuse me.”

Nobody reacts to this in any conventional way, although the girlfriend’s “life insurance” question when Juan Pablo is considering what to do before he dies is almost funny.

An absurdly generous bonus at work (where he doesn’t reveal his death sentence) leads him and Javier to jump to the correct conclusion that the owner (Ana Cristina Botero) is using the over-staffed office for money-laundering, leads them to impulsively chuck it all and jet off to that “bucket list”” vacation — Barcelona, Paris, Genoa, Marseilles and Ibiza.

It’s just that “NOBODY steals from Miss Lucy and LIVES!”

As the film opens with Juan Pablo narrating his introduction, from his coffin, at his wake, we know shenanigans are afoot.

The trouble is, they aren’t forthcoming. It takes over an hour for “No Andaba Muerto” to give the lie to that first half of its title — “I’m not Dead.”

The third act has some splendid shtick, a brawl with a hitman, tumbles here and there, a laugh-out-loud corpse-come-to-life moment. Physical comedy is sorely missed in every single scene that precedes these.

The production took Netflix’s money and flew to the various cities and found virtually nothing funny to do in them — mugging for the camera here, trying to improvise a tightrope walk illusion there, dancing with street entertainers.

Setting a second Notre Dame (in Marseilles) on fire with a votive candle is funny, and torching an Italian museum while the Italian-trying-to-speak-Spanish tour guide is distracted is good for an “Innocents Abroad” laugh.

But even that arrives too late to resuscitate this corpse. You can tell from the credits that the stars have made names for themselves in earlier comedies. “Death Can Wait” does their reputations no favors.

Rating: TV-14, gunplay, sexual situations, alcohol abuse

Cast: Ricardo Quevedo, Nelson Polonia, Liss Pereira and Ana Cristina Botero

Credits: Written and directed by Fernando Ayllón, A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

Filmmaker takes 40 years to years to film and finish his documentary on the great writer.

Reminds me of the stories about Henry Jaglom and Peter Bogdanovich, always recording and filming as they cozied up to Orson Welles.

Will this see the light of day?

He doesn’t compose songs or write lyrics. Yet.

But is there nothing this man cannot do?

https://www.instagram.com/tv/B_8IgCmHFuC/?utm_source=ig_embed

A few months before “The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio” came out on film, the publisher and releasing studio (Dreamworks) sent me the book, Terry Ryan’s memoir of growing up in a dysfunctional yet functioning family in the 1950s and ’60s.

The film was poorly distributed and didn’t really get its due in 2005, not even playing the big market where I was living and reviewing. I didn’t get around to seeing it when it hit video as, well, you could tell what it was going to be just from the book and the casting.

It would be sentimental, old fashioned and nostalgic, a memoir of having a plucky mother raising 10 kids in a Catholic family whose creative outlet — after motherhood — was concocting winning jingles, poems, slogans and the like in the contest-crazy America of the “I Like Ike” ’50s.

Julianne Moore, the very face of white American motherhood in the ’50s (“Far From Heaven”) stars,  with Woody Harrelson as the hapless husband who never quite earns enough to prop them up, and who occasionally drowns his responsibilities and dashed dreams in drink — a repentant but abusive drunk.

Mom’s prize winnings kept them afloat for decades, until that era of contests that rewarded creativity and not mere chance passed.

I felt as if I’d seen it before seeing it. But coming across up leading up to Mother’s Day, I got around to it and watched it with my mother.

Adapter-director Jane Anderson’s film has a vivid “Christmas Story” sense of place and stars three future Oscar winners. Julianne and Laura Dern, a fellow contest fanatic, would collects statuettes. And Harrelson’s on the short list of the best characters actors to never have won one…yet.

Anderson already had an Emmy (“The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-murdering Mom”) and would win another for “Olive Kitteridge”). She wrote “The Wife,” which landed Glenn Close an Oscar nomination.

Her “Prize Winner” is predictable in its theme, the saintly mother overcoming all, including a husband her kids suggest she kick out (their priest won’t hear of it).

But it gets by on pluck and charm and that “Stella Dallas” mom-as-martyr thing that works every single time.

As “Dad” says (like the Pences, these archaic Ohioans call each other “Mother” and “Dad”) — “You know what your problem is?”

“No Dad, I don’t.”

“You’re too damn happy.”

The kids aren’t entirely colorless — none have gone on to fame in the acting field.

And the story lurches from crisis to crisis, Mother living that life of “a dream deferred” as trips she wins are passed up, a Triumph TR-3 she collects as a prize must be sold, and Dad drinking and lashing out at the glories and cash this one-time aspiring poet and small town newspaper writers brings to the household.

But Moore makes this caricature of 1950s motherhood a down-to-Earth delight.

“Let’s go to bed. I’m tired of this day. I need a new one.”

Dern lends her radiant presence to the third act. And Harrelson does what Harrelson always does — make the hateful or pathetic charming and sympathetic.

“Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio” may not speak to younger generations. But to anybody looking for how hard working mom’s had it back in the day, the struggle their mothers and grandmothers lived through pre-“liberation,” you couldn’t ask for a better Mother’s Day movie.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, some disturbing images and language

Cast: Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, Ellary Porterfield, Trevor Morgan and Laura Dern.

Credits: Written and directed by Jane Anderson, based on the Terry Ryan memoir.  A Dreamworks release on Roku, Tubi, Amazon Prime.

Running time: